The English-speaking geopolitical press has been simultaneously applauding German Chancellor Angela Merkel for her unexpectedly high domestic approval ratings at this stage -- around 70 percent -- while chastising her for winning it by derailing the path of labour reform begun by Gerhard Schroeder with Agenda 2010, reforms that many economists credit with driving the country's current rebound. Her "grand coalition" merging the centre-right CDU and centre-left SPD parties, Bertrand Benoit writes in the Financial Times, is shifting to the left. "In recent weeks, Mr Beck has been busy unstitching Mr Schröder's handiwork. Mr Beck's latest initiative, a proposal to increase unemployment benefits for older jobseekers, is symbolic. Across Germany's political parties and deep within its government, the voices calling for a "reform of the reforms" are growing louder." Nicholas Kulish, the NYT's new Berlin bureau chief, wrote something along these lines last month in his Memo from Berlin that Merkel is "cruising" on her popularity by going green and ignoring the economy altogether, which harsher words about the German populace (although the same could be said of social systems in most any other country), "At heart, local analysts said, the German people did not really want aggressive reforms. They were more than content to let the state care for them, from kindergarten all the way to retirement".

Two German scientists were granted the Nobel Prizes in Physics and Chemistry, the former, Peter Grünberg, for discovering a magnetic process that helps keep hard drives small like in the iPod (shared with a Frenchman who found it at the same time). The latter, Gerhard Ertl, and aided the advancement of all kinds of industrial products, from fertilisers to catalytic converters, with his work in surface reactions. Mr. Ertl was taken completely off guard by the call from Stockholm, all the more so it being his 71st birthday. Mr. Grünberg, not to be a victim of surprise, was waiting by his phone for the call at exactly 11:30. You can't really get more German than that.

The soon-to-be-published Encyclopedia of Northern Kentucky confirms there were a lot of northwestern Germans running along the Ohio River back in the day, "Census records for Northern Kentucky reveal that more than three-fourths of the German immigration derived from northern Germany, especially northwestern Germany, which provides a key to an understanding of the German heritage of the region and which mirrors the origins of the German immigration north of the Ohio River as well."